Ingrid Yeung ‘23
Last year, we were able to walk around campus and see the display of student artwork around every corner of St. Mark’s. However, in a challenging situation like this year, much of the art completed over the summer or during the new school year are trapped in houses or archived as pictures in cloud drives. We have lost the opportunity to see many inspiring artworks in real life, but thankfully, we still have the internet to share works of incredible artists at our school.
Over the summer, the Advanced Studio class had compiled some aesthetic and inspiring art projects. Under the remote learning environment, students worked creatively with the resources they had. Mrs. Putnam managed to mail students art supplies and worked closely with the students online. Each student in the Advanced Studio class focused on a specific topic or issue and developed a series of artworks surrounding that topic. While developing a central theme for their portfolio, the students also incorporated various painting styles and drawings and utilized multiple media in creative combinations. Each artwork shows the depth in the students’ thoughts and reveals the uniqueness in the style of all the Studio III Students.
Celine Ma-- A Deeper Look into Animal Rights
“Growing up, my parents wanted to ensure that I’d grow into a kind person. I put this into action by always being kind to the animals around me. By being attentive to animal-related news and topics, I’ve grown into an activist who fights for the rights of abused animals.”
Celine has always been an activist for the rights of abused animals. Since a very young age, she has taken care of animals and helped stray dogs and cats. Though unintentional in the beginning, she realized that she had developed a consistent and central theme about animal rights in her artworks since she was in Studio II. Recognizing the strength and influence of art, she hopes to use it as a tool to make a statement and to raise awareness of animal abuse and issues on animal rights.
Tinted, colored pencil on paper
This summer, Celine continued to dive deeper into the complex topic of animal rights and animal abuse. In the piece, Tinted, Celine focused on the topic of whale hunting. By depicting the bloody ocean and a harpoon pointing straight at the helpless whale, she visualizes the fear, pain, and horror that the whales experience, bringing the viewer into experiencing the massacre in the first person.
Daniella Pozo -- Communicating Identity
“I spent a lot of time looking at myself, my family, and my home over quarantine. This project was a culmination of all that time I spent back home and hopefully a starting point for projects I’ll do this year.”
During the quarantined summer, Daniella spent much of her time reflecting and communicating her own identity through art. She started with unpacking the duality in her identity, such as being at home vs. being in St. Mark’s and speaking Spanish at home vs. English at school. By thinking and reflecting on her own identity in different ways, she also wanted to express herself in new ways or new forms of art.
By taking a course with SAIC during the summer, which aims to let the student combine cartoons with fine paintings, Daniella spent most of her summer experimenting and trying new things in her artworks. Although she has felt uneasy or out of ideas from time to time, she challenged and pushed herself into testing out unconventional ways of painting.
Katie Mao: Art of Fusion(with birds)
“Throughout the years in China, the traditional alleyways are starting to decrease, it did not stop for architects from building new ones that looked similar, but the history behind the old buildings are lost.”
In this project, Katie worked with traditional Chinese elements in her art and tried to fuse it with the contemporary art style. By adding more colors and strokes, she tweaked traditional Chinese Art and made it more vibrant. Over the summer, she took a course on the Chinese Brush Pen called “Maobi”. Through the course, she learned about the importance of brushstrokes and the long history behind each art process. Now, she is learning to draw nature, scenery, and birds using the Chinese art style. With a particular interest in drawing birds, Katie tries to incorporate elements of birds in most of her drawings as well.
While she is experimenting with a new art style, she wants to convey the permanent loss of traditional Chinese culture in torn-down architecture and the replacement of those by new buildings built in similar ways but without historical meanings. Illustrating the amazing details in her artworks, Katie invites us to see the pure beauty of Chinese culture and history.
Catie Summers: The Ongoing Human Rights Issue in our Society
“It’s not enough to simply believe the right thing. We must all actively work against oppressors and the prevailing issues our society struggles with this very day.”
Catie concentrates the theme of her project on the ongoing human rights issue in our society. She wants to make people more aware of historical societal issues in the world through her artwork. Something that Catie found challenging while developing the series was generating ideas that well reflect the problems at hand emotionally and artistically to provoke thoughts and feelings.
One of Catie’s favorite pieces among her artworks was the boy sitting in the cage. It depicts the protest of immigration and presents the irony of the statement “land of the free”. Through this work, Catie offers a critique of the American immigration system. “Due to unjust racial barriers, millions of immigrants find themselves completely blocked out of the US or stuck in a dreadful state of in-between. Immigrant families are torn apart, and children are forced to live in cages at the border. This is one of the many issues that not only needs to be brought to more attention but also needs people actively working toward a solution.”
Laryssa Barbosa: Sustainability is More than Recycling
“ Many of us think of sustainability just as recycling, when in reality, the saying is reuse, reduce, recycle.”
Laryssa’s consistent theme in her artwork is sustainability. She hopes to raise awareness of what sustainability really is and how people can actively resolve the issue through small acts in everyday life. She has reduced her waste by not purchasing unnecessary things, reusing containers, and even cutting down clothes purchases.
Through her artworks, Laryssa wants to explore the impact of unsustainable lifestyles globally. She tries to use different media in drawing different elements and explore the use of color. More importantly, All of her pieces were created from recycled paper. Just as she said, “why let them go to waste when they could create a masterpiece?”
Nashua Poreda- The Creative Realistic Nature
“The more unknown an idea is, the more interested I become.”
Nashua focused her topic on the creative nature of the outdoors. Through her art, she wanted to capture the always-changing nature and merge the two sides of nature into one. She has become interested in the creative side of her works, but at the same time, she keeps a sense of realism. She hopes to depict outdoor scenes with creative touches without losing the accuracy of pure nature.
Nashua’s artworks are mostly related to the local environment in Massachusetts, and she is still developing more about her topic on nature. Like the other students, Nashua also tried to utilize different media in her work and even print over the summer.
All of the students’ artworks presented are the result of the students’ contemplation of current issues. They have put in a lot of effort into their project, but unfortunately, we cannot see them displayed at school. Luckily, we have the internet and St. Mark’s online media platform to help us showcase these fantastic and well-created artworks online. With unexpected problems arising every day in the world, every one of us at St. Mark is striving to work creatively to accommodate this situations.